Find out more on CobaltWASD.com or head directly to the Steam store page!

Long time no blog post! Welcome back, glad to see you are still around.

Since the launch of Cobalt we have been busy working on improving the core game but also looking at what else can be done with what we’ve got. To be honest, Cobalt did not meet our expectations, and we decided to analyze what we could have done differently. There are of course many facets and opinions, but we boiled it down to these three main points:

1. Cobalt had too many options

We noticed that players were confused if Cobalt was a multiplayer or single-player game. Did it have a story? Did it have online play? Was there any co-op? Combat challenges AND speed challenges? What are the classic/alpha/triggers control modes and what do they mean?

Not only that, but each game mode came with a plethora of options and settings. Playing deathmatch? Free for all? Teams? Use map settings or custom character classes? What settings should I use to have the most fun? In addition, challenge maps could be played both in the arena and in the campaign, but with different setups.

For us this was a strength of Cobalt. An never-ending range of customization, but very confusing for new players.

2. PC gamers prefer not to play with controller

Although there are many games on Steam that you play with keyboard or controller, this is not the preferable choice. We love Cobalt’s controls and the gameplay that is designed around it, but many players still requested to be able to aim with the mouse.

3. The price point may not have been optimal

Cobalt took 7 years to build and contains a lot of content. Still, it’s possible that the price point were off-putting for many people. We tried discounts and free weekends, but the interest had already faded.

So what is Cobalt W.A.S.D.?

It’s a separate stand-alone game in the Cobalt universe. You play with mouse and keyboard. There is only one game mode. The game mode has very clear rules and clear options. It’s multi-player focused (though you can practice with bots, of course). And most importantly, it’s a lot of fun!

When will it be available?

We are currently polishing the last little bits and churning out the last few bugs. Our plan is to release the full game some time in August, 2017, and we will announce a more specific date when we have one. It will only be available on Steam, and will be priced at $6.99. Players who bought the early access of Cobalt will get a Cobalt W.A.S.D. key added to their Mojang accounts for free. There will also be a discounted Cobalt bundle that lets current Cobalt owners to get Cobalt W.A.S.D. at a slightly lower price.

How can you help?

Until release we are running a closed beta test of Cobalt W.A.S.D. You can join this test by requesting a game code in the Cobalt discord, and by that help us find and fix bugs. Beyond that we gladly appreciate any creative sharing such as streams, YouTube, or just chatting about the game. Cheers!

Helpful links:

Cobalt discord – https://discordapp.com/invite/sreHKwR
Cobalt on reddit – https://www.reddit.com/r/cobalt/
Cobalt on Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/PlayCobalt/
Oxeye Game Studio on twitter – https://twitter.com/OxeyeGames

Cheers!

We are super happy to announce that Cobalt is now available on Steam, Xbox One, and Xbox 360!

Here’s the Steam store page: store.steampowered.com/app/357340

And here’s Cobalt on Xbox.com: store.xbox.com/en-US/Xbox-One/Games/Cobalt

Cobalt is coming to Steam, Xbox One, and Xbox 360 on February 2! The game will cost $19.99, and comes with a single-player story campaign, challenge maps, co-op survival maps, and several multiplayer game modes for both local and online play.

Check out the full release post in the Mojang blog!

If you’ve pre-purchased the alpha you will get a Steam code added to your Mojang account. We will only release the Windows version now, so Mac and Linux users will have to wait just a little bit longer. This is because we switched game engines (from DaisyMoon to Stingray) in order to add online multiplayer.

The community has helped us put together a “release frequently asked questions” on the Cobalt subreddit: Cobalt release FAQ

Thank you for your patience!

Vu and Lydia taking it away!

Last weekend (4-5 july) we attended Minecon in London with a 10 computer booth running Cobalt. It was an amazing weekend which superseded our expectations in all ways imaginable. Here is just a small sample of what was going on:

Being handed your Mojang badge is like being handed the holy grail. With great power....

Booth looks bloody stellar. Jeb approves I think...

How do you install a game on a hard drive with 1 gb free space on it...

No worries. Multiplay changed out the computers and now we are rolling!

Crowd did all count down from 10 in unison.

Booth filled up quickly and now the focus was on making sure everybody had the best time that we could give them.

No crashes so far!

I present to you: Aconitin! One of our amazing volunteer agents and a force of nature within the Cobalt community.

People of all ages were playing. The most fun was to walk up to a parent who wasn't playing and just hand them a controller. No excuses! Everyone plays!

I present to you: Isogash! Another of our amazing volunteer agents. A pillar of our Cobalt community

I present to you: Janeator! The last of our amazing volunteer agents, without which Cobalt would have about 99% less maps!

The duel between jeb and tommo drew a crowd. Jeb won this one.

Panel was very interesting! I mean, we went from facts about development, to smashing people on stage to finally thewreck getting owned by burntcustard!

We had a special tournament where you could challenge one of the agents, AKA "the pros", no mercy. If you won you got the game for free!

Aconitin, one of our pro players, is setting up for a challenge. He was throughout minecon, undefeated.

Parents were not left out of the fun.

Discussing those pro-tactics™

We did not have to tell people to check out the tutorial. The booth pretty much ran itself for most of the time!

Smiles were seen all around!

Only two would beat the pros during the two days!

Thank you for an amazing Minecon!

Photographers: Ebba Kierkegaard, Daniel Brynolf

Also! Some videos…

This is a quick update to the state of “more than four xbox controllers in cobalt”.

Due to the comments on the last post, I realized the fix was rather trivial.

In v125 all xbox controllers after the forth will instead be added as direct input devices. This means they will be slightly less featured, lacking force feedback and worse analog trigger support. But it will work:

I tried this with 4 wired xbox 360 controllers, and 1 wireless xbox 360 controllers using a usb-dongle receiver.

/thewreck

We are working on v125! Things that we have done to far include:

• Adventure mode
• Reworked gamemodes
• Polished and reworked maps
• Lots of new community maps included in the game
• Improved flow
• More options in game modes
• Optimizations
• How to play section
• Improved controls view

We are currently focusing mainly on game stability and optimizations.

Here are a bunch of progress shots:

Improved player setup flow

Improved level selector

Improved and updated maps and modes

Adventure!

Adventure!

Adventure!

Improved controls view

Welcome back!

Did you enjoy last weekend’s post? Well if you did, more awesomeness is awaiting you… so click that read more button now!

Reworked maps

That’s right! A lot of your favourite maps are getting a new look to raise their awesomeness level for this next release. Also, some maps have been improved in terms of design, as well. Take a look:

Hey! Isn’t that Frozen? Well, it doesn’t look frozen anymore, but it looks like there’s been some more changes aside from that, doesn’t it?

Capture the Plug: reworked

Capture the Plug has always been a gamemode that I’ve loved. However, the AI for it was never too good, and maybe you think that “something” was missing as well…

That is no more! The AI has been improved quite a lot, as I’m sure you’ll be able to tell. New Ai is capable of defending or attacking more properly.

Also… there’s even more changes to CTP! Big changes indeed!

As you can see in that picture, players now drop random upgrades on death, like in dynamic deathmatch.

All of this results in an awesome new way to play CTP maps! I’m sure you will all love it.

Characters!

What are characters? Well, these are what you pick on Team Strike, Challenge and (dynamic) Deathmatch maps.

Actually, that definition is a bit outdated now. Characters have also been added to the reworked Capture the plug mode!

And not just that, but there’s also a TON of new characters. And a lot of customization!

I wonder what each one does, exactly…

Aren’t those community maps?

Did you ever think there weren’t enough maps in the game’s Arcade? Then get ready for this… in this next update a number of dev-picked community maps are joining the game’s Arcade section! They will be ready for you to play right away just by updating/installing the game.

Also… if you haven’t yet, you should definitely try out Cobalt’s map editor! It allows you to create that epic map you always wanted to. if you need help or info, drop by the mapmaking section of the forum!

If you want to try out the great stuff that some people in the community have already made, check out Cobalt Vault here.

A last big change

…or at least for now! But hey, this one is a really important one. No, I’m serious. Get ready to throw away your old skills (or part of them!) and learn how to play Cobalt again!

Well, maybe that was a bit too much, but honestly, this is indeed a big change:

Rolling has been reworked.

Yes, you heard that right! Maybe you already saw Bopo’s tweet and have been trying to decipher its meaning? Wonder no more!

Before, when you pressed Z, you would roll. Instead of hurting you, bullets would be deflected! Time it perfectly, and the bullets would fly straight towards your foes. And sometimes you even recieve bacon.

That changes now. No, not the bacon. The deflecting bullets part. From now on, when you roll your metalface will have “3 parts” in which bullets can hit:

The very top of your head, which will reflect bullets.

The feet, which is now a weak spot! This adds a lot more depth to rolling and timing, instead of just spamming it.

The rest of the body, which will deflect bullets normally.

I have played a few matches using the new rolling system, and I like it a lot. Before, you’d have to keep shooting an enemy hoping that a bullet hit him between rolls, and hope that the reflected bullets would hopefully not kill you before that. Or if you were the one rolling, you just had to time your rolls to not be hit in between them. With the new system, all this rolling-spam action gets an update, but your skills need one as well. You’ll now have to think about rolling to the left or to the right, depending on which direction are you going, how far away the incoming bullets are… a whole new level of awesomeness!

That’s all for this week!

I truly cannot wait for v125 to be released to the public, and I’m sure you people can’t wait either.

However, I believe it shouldn’t take too long now. There’s still a lot of bug fixing to do, but remember that if the update is taking long, it’s because it’s going to be awesome, and probably almost-bug-free.

With all this said, let me know in the comments what you’d like to know next! At the moment there’s no more content for me to deliver in the form of a blogpost, but I’ll answer most questions that you guys write down there!

Hope you liked the post!

/janeator

Hello everyone! It’s time for a blogpost again! And this time, I bring you news about some big changes that some of us will get to test in the next prerelease so you can have an awesome experience once v125 is out!

Hit “read more” to learn more about these big changes!

Menu changes

“Booo, what is this! You said big changes”

Well, give me a minute here; I’m telling you, there’s big changes! This one might be a small one but it’s pretty awesome. See it yourself:

Now, pretty awesome, isn’t it?

Waves Survival changes

So, apparently some people weren’t too happy with the new Survival gamemode introduced in v123 and how it changed a lot of stuff, and well, how it added “gambling”.

Well, good news for you! And I guess it still is cool news for everyone who was happy with the new Survival anyway. See this!

Is that… new shops? And more maps?

Wow! Feels like Survival has been fully reworked again. Well it has… almost!

You will still fight waves of enemies and buy stuff constantly if you want to survive, just like in v124 Waves Survival… except this time, you won’t despawn. And that means buying stuff will be done in a different way: You’ll have to scout the map to find and unlock different shops where you can purchase different kinds of stuff.

Up to 6 new shops have been created, and they work in a different way than the old Waves Survival shop did:

• Each shop will have one kind of items, with better and somewhat more expensive items on the rightmost columns of the shop.
• Every round all columns will be refilled: If you didn’t buy anything from a shop’s column, the item on the top row will dissapear. So if you want to save a top row item you can’t buy for the next round, consider buying a cheaper item below the one you want!
• No gambling!

More news next week!

That’s right; come back next week, I’ll have more fresh news ready! I think today’s news are already pretty awesome.

However, if you’re not satisfied, here’s a gif by community member mkster in which he performs amazing tricks using one of the new melee weapons. Watch it! Rewatch it! Watch it again! Watch it ten more times! Once you’ve watched it that many times, I bet your skills will have improved a bit. Awesome, isn’t it?

So, see you next week!

/janeator